Archive for April, 2006

So, the other day I posted something here ranting about how slow it is to build a web app here in VS 2005. We’ve been wasting a lot of time here because of that. Doing some research on the internet, I ran accross some info that didn’t help me much. For instance:

Found this hotfix: FIX: Visual Studio 2005 may stop responding when you build a Web application project that is checked out of Visual SourceSafe (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=915110). This really seemed like what the problem was here. Basically, everytime i was hitting Rebuild, I could tell VS was doing something (by an animated icon somewhere), but I would not see any progress on the Build Output window. Then after the long 5-10 minutes of waiting, I’d see something on the ouput window, like "Validating Web Site", "Building directory…". From that point on, it’d take about 20 seconds to finish the process. Well, one couldn’t download the hotfix (you have to call MS support to get it). We’ve got the hotfix and applied it, but didn’t seem to fix the problem.

At this point, we aren’t going the new web project coming with the VS 2005 Service Pack since it’s not release yet, so we’re just sticking to what we’ve got. Here’s the solution I’ve found to remedy the problem meanwhile:

Most of the problem with the slowness seems to be related to the contents under the Bin folder (which is under the web app folder – I’m using the File System-based "project").

I remove all the files contained within the bin folder (including all the junk that gets there, such as files with extensions like .pdb, .refresh, and .xml, that shouldn’t be there).

I put copies of all the assemblies I need on the bin folder (our biz objs assemblies and stuff like that).

When I rebuild the solution at this point, it takes just under 20 seconds! Yay!!

For about three years we’ve seen lots of presentations where there was a lot of hyp regarding new things coming in ASP.NET 2.0. Master Pages, Membership, two-way data binding, etc, etc, etc. We’ve heard a lot about developers being able to write 70% less code with all the new things.

That is all great!!!

However, there wasn’t much hype about how terribly slow it is to build a web project. Gee, it’s cool that we can write 70% less code, but it’s definitely not cool having to wait almost 5 minutes for a 6-page project to build. Even if you right-click on a single page and choose "Build Page", that takes long and painful minutes.

It’s hard to understand how this thing shipped with a major problem like that.

Ok, it’s just finished building the project here, I can resume work. I’ll probably post something new to the blog during the next build.

Tomorrow I’m doing a presentation at the local C# user group (at the HalPC in Houston).

C# 3.0 and LINQ

The next version of C# (3.0) brings many new exciting features, such as Extension Methods, Type Inference, Anonymous Types, etc. These new features are the main force behind LINQ (Language Integrated Query), but they can also be very useful on their own. In this talk we’ll go through all these new features to know what they are and how they can be used, and how they ultimately bring LINQ to life.